Player knowledge

[Ingwe Ingweron]

OK, this tells me where to look. I have some suspicions.

Yeah, whatever the last batch of changes were, the stability went backwards quite a bit. Lot's of crashes now, but none duplicable, so far.

The slow-down is also starting to get aggravating. But maybe it's a good thing. I'm having to retrain my fingers to hit a key, then wait, before hitting another, especially when lot's of monsters are around.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

• Items dropped by monsters beneath the player being autoinscribed

Okay, I've experienced this bug now, also.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Minor bug. Two staves are in a room, a Staff of Detect Evil and an empty Staff of Identify. The object sub-window only shows the Detect Evil staff. Blind_Bat.zip

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Blind_Bat.zip Take a look at the messages. "Something picks up 3 Scrolls of Identify." But, those scrolls are two squares outside the range of @'s light source. The "?" symbol remains, which is appropriate given that @ hasn't seen the square again. But, @ should not have gotten the message.

@ has ESP now, but since it was "something" that picked up the scrolls and that something isn't shown on the map, it isn't detected by ESP. Shouldn't it be that if an object is picked up outside the @'s light radius, that unless @ can see the creature via Infravision or ESP, then no "something picks up" message should be generated?

[Nick]

Yeah, whatever the last batch of changes were, the stability went backwards quite a bit. Lot's of crashes now, but none duplicable, so far.

I kind of expected this. I have put in a bunch of paranoid checking in an attempt to narrow down where the problems are occurring - this will worsen the play experience in the short term, but should help stability in the long run.

I suspect progress will be slow for a bit due to RL, but I really want to get this sorted, so I'll be thinking about it whenever possible.

[Nick]

New Windows and OS X builds up - small changes, but might help.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

The latest iteration still crashes quite a bit, but nothing replicable. I'm feeling frustrated. I will take a break from the bug hunting for a few days.

[Nick]

The latest iteration still crashes quite a bit, but nothing replicable. I'm feeling frustrated. I will take a break from the bug hunting for a few days.

Yes, good idea. My current plan is to try and redo the analysis of what code should be doing what, rather than continuing trying to repair based on where it's crashing. So I'll post when I have an update which I think is an improvement, but that will probably be a while.

[Nick]

Against all expectations, some progress may have happened. I have found and (I think) fixed two bugs which between them explain all the crashes I've been seeing, and played for a bit without any problems.

So new builds - Windows and OS X - are up. Good luck to all of us

[Ingwe Ingweron]

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." - Michael Corleone, Godfather III

[Nick]

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." - Michael Corleone, Godfather III

Yeah - not without some trepidation

I've got a new character down to DL8 with no problems, but we';; have to see what happens when there are more items, monsters that pick them up, etc

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Okay, I've gotten a @ down from DL 1 to DL 53 with no crashes. Great job, Nick!

All the bugs encountered on this run have been previously reported:

(1) “Something crushes a [object].” @ has ESP. The object in question was found and is on the ground, but is out of LoS or light radius. The creature crushing the object is not detectable by ESP or Infravision. @ should not receive the “Something crushes… message. A corollary would be that if @ could detect the creature by ESP or sees it with Infravision, that the message should be received and the object symbol should vanish from the map - I'm not sure if it is working this way.

(2) When disarming a trap, should it be automatically repeating the attempts until success or setting it off? Unlike tunneling, picking a lock, or opening a door, my feeling is that trap disarming should not automatically repeat attempts. The former do not pose damage risk to @, trap disarming does pose risk. I might want to risk it once, but not three times. The number of times I take that risk should be up to me, not an automatic reiteration.

(3) auto-inscribe on walk-over or roll under foot for monster dropped items.

(4) Item ignore bug. Items that should be average, good, or excellent with no high resists, but instead sometimes the ignore prompt says they are excellent but not splendid.

(5) General slowness (c.f., Tunneling and watching the counter slowly tick down, etc.)

[Ingwe Ingweron]

How's this for a crash? Kill Sauron and game instantly crashes. Not easily replicable, but very frustrating. Other than that, no crashes and only the previously reported bugs.

[Nick]

How's this for a crash? Kill Sauron and game instantly crashes. Not easily replicable, but very frustrating. Other than that, no crashes and only the previously reported bugs.

Excellent, apart from the bit which is very bad.

For the other bugs, I think 2 is just the way it has always been. The others certainly need fixing. I probably will do that soon and put out another build of this branch, but I also need to get back and fix some of the 4.0.4 bugs, too.

[Nick]

New Windows and OS X builds up. The crash on killing Sauron bug is fixed, and I believe and hope that the monster crush/pickup bug and the autoinscription of floor items bug are also fixed.

Slowdown I am leaving for now, because it needs fixing on the master branch. The bad ignore setting led me into a maze of twisty passages in determining how an item gets marked as sensed; my preferred strategy here is to wait until I'm redoing ID, and then dynamite said maze and start again.

My intention now is for this to be the last build on this branch. Plan is to bugfix 4.0.4 now, which should result in the release of 4.0.5 (last 4.0.x, really this time), and then start pulling in the current feature branches (cone breath and knowledge). Then rune-based ID.